Intelligent transportation systems are a set of technological solutions used to improve the performance and safety of road transportation. A crucial element for the success of these systems is the exchange of information, not only between vehicles, but also among other components in the road infrastructure through different applications. One of the most important information sources in this kind of systems is sensors. Sensors can be within vehicles or as part of the infrastructure, such as bridges, roads or traffic signs. Sensors can provide information related to weather conditions and traffic situation, which is useful to improve the driving process. To facilitate the exchange of information between the different applications that use sensor data, a common framework of knowledge is needed to allow interoperability. In this paper an ontology-driven architecture to improve the driving environment through a traffic sensor network is proposed. The system performs different tasks automatically to increase driver safety and comfort using the information provided by the sensors.

One of the biggest challenges in modern societies is to solve vehicular traffic problems. Sensor networks in traffic environments have contributed to improving the decision-making process of Intelligent Transportation Systems. However, one of the limiting factors for the effectiveness of these systems is in the deployment of sensors to provide accurate information about the traffic. Our proposal is using the centrality measurement of a graph as a base to locate the best locations for sensor installation in a traffic network. After integrating these sensors in a simulation scenario, we define a Multi-Agent Systems composed of three types of agents: traffic light management agents, traffic jam detection agents, and agents that control the traffic lights at an intersection. The ultimate goal of these Multi-Agent Systems is to improve the trip duration for vehicles in the network. To validate our solution, we have developed the needed elements for modelling the sensors and agents in the simulation environment. We have carried out experiments using the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) traffic simulator and the Travel and Activity PAtterns Simulation (TAPAS) Cologne traffic scenario. The obtained results show that our proposal allows to reduce the sensor network while still obtaining relevant information to have a global view of the environment. Finally, regarding the Multi-Agent Systems, we have carried out experiments that show that our proposal is able to improve other existing solutions such as conventional traffic light management systems (static or dynamic) in terms of reduction of vehicle trip duration and reduction of the message exchange overhead in the sensor network.

Smart grids (SG) are essential for efficient management and monitoring of electric power networks. One of the most important tasks in SG focuses on fault detection and automatic network reconfiguration. This process allows minimizing power losses and load balancing in distribution networks. In this paper, an adaptation of the open shortest path first (OSPF) routing protocol to accomplish the network reconfiguration task is proposed. The algorithm is intended to run in secondary substation nodes over an agent-based distributed architecture. The proposed algorithm has been tested on the IEEE 123 modified node test feeder and on an actual grid deployed by an electrical distribution company. Moreover, a performance comparison with a typical centralized reconfiguration algorithm is carried out.

Sensor networks are a concept that has become very popular in data acquisition and processing for multiple applications in different fields such as industrial, medicine, home automation, environmental detection, etc. Today, with the proliferation of small communication devices with sensors that collect environmental data, semantic Web technologies are becoming closely related with sensor networks. The linking of elements from Semantic Web technologies with sensor networks has been called Semantic Sensor Web and has among its main features the use of ontologies. One of the key challenges of using ontologies in sensor networks is to provide mechanisms to integrate and exchange knowledge from heterogeneous sources (that is, dealing with semantic heterogeneity). Ontology alignment is the process of bringing ontologies into mutual agreement by the automatic discovery of mappings between related concepts. This paper presents a system for ontology alignment in the Semantic Sensor Web which uses fuzzy logic techniques to combine similarity measures between entities of different ontologies. The proposed approach focuses on two key elements: the terminological similarity, which takes into account the linguistic and semantic information of the context of the entity’s names, and the structural similarity, based on both the internal and relational structure of the concepts. This work has been validated using sensor network ontologies and the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tests. The results show that the proposed techniques outperform previous approaches in terms of precision and recall.

Intelligent transportation systems are a set of technological solutions used to improve the performance and safety of road transportation. A crucial element that affects road safety is driver behavior, because driver errors are usually the principal cause of traffic accidents. Therefore, understanding and modeling human driver behavior is extremely important for the safety of the road transportation. In this paper, a Fuzzy rule-based system to classify the drivers in different profiles according to their behavior is proposed. The system will be integrated in intelligent transportation architecture, which can be used to predict and avoid traffic accidents and to optimize the routing management.

Intelligent transportation systems encompass a series of technologies and applications that exchange information to improve road traffic and avoid accidents. According to statistics, some studies argue that human mistakes cause most road accidents worldwide. For this reason, it is essential to model driver behavior to improve road safety. This paper presents a Fuzzy Rule-Based System for driver classification into different profiles considering their behavior. The system’s knowledge base includes an ontology and a set of driving rules. The ontology models the main entities related to driver behavior and their relationships with the traffic environment. The driving rules help the inference system to make decisions in different situations according to traffic regulations. The classification system has been integrated on an intelligent transportation architecture. Considering the user’s driving style, the driving assistance system sends them recommendations, such as adjusting speed or choosing alternative routes, allowing them to prevent or mitigate negative transportation events, such as road crashes or traffic jams. We carry out a set of experiments in order to test the expressiveness of the ontology along with the effectiveness of the overall classification system in different simulated traffic situations. The results of the experiments show that the ontology is expressive enough to model the knowledge of the proposed traffic scenarios, with an F1 score of 0.9. In addition, the system allows proper classification of the drivers’ behavior, with an F1 score of 0.84, outperforming Random Forest and Naive Bayes classifiers. In the simulation experiments, we observe that most of the drivers who are recommended an alternative route experience an average time gain of 66.4%, showing the utility of the proposal.